This is a purely photographic post. I usually write a lot in my posts and the things I write generally have very little to do with photography and rather tell stories heard around the places where I take the photos. But this time I wanted to be purely photographic and just tell some details of the place and why the streets are usually foggy many mornings during the year.

Montalbán is a small town located in the high valleys of the state of Carabobo, Venezuela. In general the climate in the town is warm and as in the whole country, we have only two seasons, a rainy season from May to October and a dry season from November to April. So at the time these pictures were taken here we are in the middle of the rainy season.

This type of fog-filled atmosphere is relatively common in this town. I would say that we can have about 100 early mornings and mornings of very dense fog per year. So this is a good thing to take pictures and especially street pictures, for which you can take advantage of the dramatic effect generated by the fog and also the even distribution of the lights in these conditions, always keeping in mind that sometimes the luminosity can be low due to the extreme density of the fog, which tends to vary constantly.

Generally the appearance of fog is preceded by several days of constant rain or with very few dry intervals between them, then it usually occurs on a day with clear skies, lots of solar radiation (and therefore great heat) and the feeling of humidity increases. This is when early mornings and cloudy mornings usually occur. This condition is usually maintained until around 9 AM and from then on the heat of the sun begins to dissipate the fog.

When shooting street photography I usually use zoom lenses to give me more leeway when shooting, but when shooting street photography in foggy conditions, I usually use some kind of fixed lens, either 100mm, 50mm or 35mm, which are the focal lengths I prefer. So, although I am limited in my ability to frame quickly, I usually benefit greatly from the amount of light these lenses absorb as it allows me to deal with the conditions imposed by the fog.

Certainly there are a lot of possibilities and scenes to take pictures in these conditions, but it is also true that everything "tends to happen more slowly" when there is fog. This then compensates for the limitations that fixed lenses can cause me since it can take me extra time to take the pictures... It is as if people and even some animals such as dogs and pigeons in the streets, move with a certain parsimony caused by the dense atmosphere.

I always take these photos in RAW format, because I know that at the moment of editing I will need all the necessary information to get the best out of them. In spite of this, I try to solve as many adjustments as possible from the moment of shooting, so I select the white temperatures for shadows and/or cloudy depending on the density of the fog,this puts me in a range of between 5500 and 7000K.

I also use wide apertures between f/3.5 and f/5 with the 100mm and 50mm lenses, even going as far as f/2.5 with the 35mm. So I can lower the ISO value between 400 and 640 allowing me good shooting speeds to avoid judder.

Although it is not surprising that it occurs to me to raise the ISO drastically and thus achieve some noise in the photos, I particularly like this for when I plan to edit in black and white, but even to do it in color I do it occasionally too.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... Then these photos will be exported to JGP format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3. and/or Adobe Photoshop.

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Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!

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Montalbán, Carabobo, Venezuela.